


The Bends

by kay_cricketed



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, graphic description of face mauling, jedi!Finn, nine pages of fortune cookie no one asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 23:47:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9210578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_cricketed/pseuds/kay_cricketed
Summary: "You have remained quiet the length of your life," the old man says.  "I hardly knew you breathed until you took off your helmet and failed to."In which Finn has a long road to travel before he wakes, but he'll find his own way back.





	

**i.**

 

The trees reach up like dark crooked stairways, vanishing into the low-lying mist and the lazy spiral of ash and snow. Finn can't feel the burn of the lightsaber anymore—not the heat sunk into his quivering muscles, not pain of any kind—but he shivers with each cold kiss against his cheek. The blood pooled in his clavicle has already frozen. He wants to ask Rey, _how can you stand it, girl of deserts, sand grains still stuck in your hair_. He wants to tell her that he's okay. Everything is going to be okay.

He can't. Somehow, Finn is not awake.

"Finn," Rey cries over him, dragging fistfuls of his jacket—of Poe's—into her hands. She is something pale and keen at once, like hunger. The fact he’s made her cry when she is so unshakable, so strong, makes Finn afraid of himself. No one has told him until now that power over another can be given freely, that it is approximate to love.

Finn can still remember the coarseness of her clothes and how holding her felt instead like he was being held. Her embrace was not the same as Poe Dameron's. If he survives this, Finn thinks it would be nice to understand and speak the language of touching someone, to compare dialects.

He stares up at the canopy that is twisting and shaking and falling apart around them. The planet heaves. It commits violence against itself below. At the same time, there is a stillness, the discomforting lull before the gloaming. There in that stillness, Finn sees something barely more than a flicker between smoldering bark.

He twists around (he doesn't). _Han_ , he mouths.

"So it turns out," says Han Solo, "you're a big deal after all, kid."

The Falcon lifts above the tree line, filling the spaces between them in blinding light. It washes out everything in its path. Even the stars are gone, swept out of the sky. Later, it will bring some measure of comfort to Finn—that they hadn't left Han at the bottom of a crumbling world, that the Falcon came to bring him home.

Expanding inside of Finn, iridescent, cataclysmic, an entire star system is born to replace what is lost. He has to gasp in air to make room for its suns. It grows spindly living roots that smell like the yeast in baking bread, a scent he’d forgotten he knew. He sleeps.

 

**ii.**

 

"My father was a disappointment," says Kylo Ren.

"Okay," says Finn.

"You are fortunate to never have known your family.” Kylo Ren’s mouth is gnarled and cruel, his eyes as bleak as the empty space surrounding them. They are aboard a ship belonging to the First Order. The corridor is empty, long dead. There are no faces or names to remember who had inhabited it. That is what it means to belong to the First Order. "As you grow older, you begin to see your parents for their flaws. You understand their weaknesses and despise them. After all, they built monuments to hide behind when you were too small and simple to believe otherwise. They are consummate liars.”

Finn tilts his head. He feels oddly calm, detached from his fear. He imagines he can see a moon in the distance, some barren-husk message to other planets. "Huh," he says.

"He was supposed to be invincible," says Kylo Ren.

"You're afraid," Finn says. “I get that.”

The scar burnt down Kylo Ren’s cheek ( _now when did he get that?_ ) peels away like dried algae, like human hair. He doesn’t stop with his scars, though. He continues to claw at his face, doughy chunks coming off in his fingers, bloodless. “It’s buried so deep,” Kylo Ren says, digging into his throat and piercing his esophagus with a wet whistle, “how much I wanted to love him.”

Has no one told Kylo Ren that it’s all right not to love your parents? Finn isn’t even sure that it’s true, though. What does he know about parents? What does he know about anything?

(Unbidden, he thinks about the sweat of another person’s hand. He thinks about appreciating the fine rivets that put together a wall to keep out the single-minded vacuum of space. He thinks about light, which finds its way into all places to play, which births the word _absence_. He thinks about how the first taste of freedom is thirst. Finn knows many things.)

Kylo Ren looks down into his hands, cupped around the mangled remains of his baby fat. “What do you dream, when you sleep?”

Finn thinks about it. “Well,” he hedges, “there’s this…”

 

**iii.**

 

Here is what Finn dreams: the sound of bells he’s never heard before, but what bells must sound like, round and full and dark in the cavity of a body. He can hear them in the ship. He can hear them on dead planets and on those teeming with life. He carries the bells with him, but no one else seems to notice. Sometimes they are so loud that he can’t hear what Captain Phasma is saying, and sometimes they are so quiet that he’s afraid he’s broken them with his breathing. He imagines that they string on his veins and tendons, and that the movement of his heart glugging blood pushes them to sing. He is a compartment for other things, so he can open himself up at night, unsewing what has been closed and made seamless, just to pluck the bells out and examine the scores someone made in crafting them. Not a thing is perfect in the universe. But a thing can be beautiful and made in perfect sentiment. He is listening to the bells call out into the lonely black and he’s listening when the black calls back to them. He opens the blast doors and inhales wild, lashing heat. Space is full of burning. He asks _is it okay if i walk out_ and is told _yes_. He walks out. There is a large gray moth outside, beating its feathery wings against the cold. He can reach out and touch it, if he wants to.

 

**iv.**

 

“Aren’t you the unexpected one,” says the old man. He is cloaked and muddied blue. “But I should have known. There is always another.”

Finn thinks he looks kind.

The old man smiles, eyes crinkling. He is not so old, really. Fine red hair sparks at his jawbone, on his knuckles. Sand is beaten into his body, but it hasn’t broken him yet. “Will you stay with me a while?”

“I ought to wake up,” says Finn.

“Do you have someone waiting for you?”

“I might,” Finn says, and then, “I hope.”

He doesn’t know whom he’d rather see, but he’s thinking of dark eyes and he’s imagining dark hair and he’s hoping for pilots. That Finn has two is an unexpected joy—a one in a million chance because a pilot with a strong jaw and kind eyes hadn’t existed in the First Order—and Finn is, and always has been, familiar with yearning.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” says the old man, “that you can duck your head and whisper and live under rock, and still, inevitably, someone will come find you? I know men who would have argued that it was the purpose of our lives, finding others.”

(Finn reaches. He tries to open his eyes.)

 

**v.**

 

General Organa drinks from her cup, but there is no tea in it. There is nothing in the cup. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“I’m sorry,” says Finn, because he is very sorry indeed. His own cup is filled to the brim with bird eggs, hollowed and wrapped in transparent wires. He holds the cup carefully between his knees because he would still feel awful if he hurt them. Someone had hopes for these eggs, once. The shells still bear the scars from a banked, slow fire.

“Should I tell you a secret,” says the General.

“Okay,” says Finn.

She reaches up and lets down her hair. It slides to the floor in long, shimmering waves, slips like oil into some cracks in the ground, and keeps falling. “You will need to be hard,” she says, “even when you want, so much, to be soft. You will need to be loving even when you want, so much, to serve justice. The Jedi believe in balance: a unifying force. I was never a Jedi, not like Luke. But I understood something of it—how doing what’s right isn’t necessarily the same as listening to your longings.”

Finn reaches down to help her, to stop her grey-splintered hair from slinking into the dead parts of the world. She takes his hand instead, wordlessly stopping him. She pulls him to her knees and frames his face. She’s warmer than he expected.

“I do not let anyone define me,” the General says. “But if I could give you any advice, Finn, new as you are to our mess, let it be this: Give names to what you would keep with you. Naming something is how we can remember a meteor long after it’s passed us and carried on into aphotic horizons. A name makes killing something harder; it makes finding something easier.”

Finn thinks about Poe Dameron’s careless, uncompromising grin. He thinks about the syllables of his name given air, lifting them as easily as paper. Unbidden, he closes his eyes and feels his face become hot and tight in General Organa’s hands. “I’m still,” he forces, “very sorry.”

“Finn,” she whispers, as if it’s truly a secret between them, “I am much more frightening than my son or the First Order could hope to become. A great winged beast is coming. That tiny fluttering thing in your chest—hold onto it.”

 

**vi.**

 

The village sparks and brays at the night, an entire people on fire. Finn watches them burn from behind his white helmet and feels fear bite into him and shake him like a mad dog. Someday, this will be Finn. He will be baptized in flame and understand what it means to be hunted. He knows this, in the way he knows that not all names come in sequences.

“This is not your doing,” says the old man.

“It is all of our doing,” Finn says. “Just because I couldn’t stop it doesn’t mean it wasn’t our doing.”

“Shall I show you something?” the old man asks.

“Okay. Show me something.”

The soil beneath Finn’s feet quakes and shivers, delighted at the electric current in the air, in Finn’s blood. The people all fall silent from their terror and look to the skies. Even the stormtroopers freeze and let their blasters go slack in their gloves. Finn’s fingertips are buzzing. It is an aborted inhale, waiting for release.

“And up we go,” says the old man, lifting his hand. The world moves with him.

And the village rises, breaking free of its earth and shuddering into the sky. The houses come with them. The fires come with them. The corpses and the crying come with them. They raise to the differently colored moons and the light beckons so sweetly that no one bothers to jump free. Finn shakes for an entirely different reason, because this is not the flying that thrilled him in Poe Dameron’s wake, nor the steady thrum of a ship under Rey’s repairs. This is power, and mercy, and reparation.

“How curious,” says the old man, “that you see mercy in its working.”

“How is this anything but mercy?” Finn asks him, helpless. “How is my being here—alive, with a name—how is it anything but mercy?”

“Do you really believe you are meant for such a poor fate, Finn?”

“Then it’s a good one?”

“I really have no idea,” says the old man, shrugging. He lets them fall, down into the pit of the stars. But even that is some kind of mercy given form.

“That isn’t really how the Force works,” he says, too.

 

**vii.**

 

He tells Finn a little bit about how the Force _does_ work, but it’s confusing. It’s adaptable currents and circles and weights. It’s neither good nor evil, but a child of the cosmos, the metamorphosis of nature and the ether that others define as spiritual, soulful, ineffable. It’s in everything and everyone, and it can be poisoned. Finn tries to imagine the Force, but all he can think about is groundwater beneath the ridges and lands of planets that believe they have none, beneath even the fabric of space. Whatever is put into it, the galaxy is colored in its likeness. Whatever _they_ put into it, the Force becomes.

“It seeks balance,” the old man tells him. “Equilibrium.”

But with all of this struggle, Finn has to wonder if the Force can ever be what it once was. Natural attenuation may clean toxins from the groundwater, but it does so by evolving, integrating those toxins into its nervous system and becoming something new. The whole length of the universe is an awfully long time, he thinks, for the Force to be only one thing.

“Interesting,” says the old man.

 

**viii.**

 

“You need a pilot,” Poe Dameron says, wonder and incredulity changing his face into even more perfect formations.

“I need a pilot,” Finn agrees, and because he can live this moment all over again, he grasps Poe’s hands and gives him a smile. “I need a pilot like _you_.”

“You have no idea,” says Poe, “all the ways I’m not the man you think I am.”

“But I know all the ways you are,” Finn says. He touches the marks of harm on Poe’s cheekbone and aches deeply, having the time and familiarity to do so now. Where his fingertips brush, dirt and blood thin like water. Poe is washed clean. He is remade, not new but patched, the flicker of vitality in him undiminished.

“Just look at you,” Poe breathes in awe.

“Who, me?”

“As it turns out,” says Poe, “you’re just what I need, too.” He grins, and the march of stormtroopers past their hiding place chases Finn’s pulse, unable to keep up.

****ix.** **

In the dark, there is a man folded together like a piece of art. “Come closer,” he says to Finn. “I will give you the words they locked away.”

Finn goes to him. He would crawl if he had to.

(He doesn’t know this man. But he recognizes, somehow, a soul comfortable to his own. In another life, their shared silences would have been precious, his humor always welcome. In another life, this man without sight would have spotted Finn in a crowd of white plastics and called to him by name—would have seen Finn’s wobbling heart behind his armor and laughed. How much the world takes away when it abides with time.)

“They will teach you something about the Force,” says the man, here now, gently clipping Finn’s chin. “But let me teach you something first.”

Finn begins to wake. He can feel it in his bones, like a tiny animal stirring in its den.

“ _I am one with the Force_ ,” the man says, with a steadfast certainty that Finn has never known. “ _The Force is with me_.”

There—not groundwater, not benevolence, not a dizzy spin into the atmosphere, not a validation of one’s actions or inaction—and now Finn can feel its teeth and hear the hot soggy breathing under his own. It is not in the universe. It is in Finn, and it has been all along.

This is how the Force works: inside arteries, inside galaxies, a long ringing sound that touches them all as it passes to where atoms have gone quiet.

 

****x.****

 

Finn needs to wake up; he’s so close that he can taste a different kind of air between his molars. He stares down at his body, dressed in white, still as death. Rey is with him, talking to him about the map to Skywalker. Her hair is bound back anew, but she’s not retreated back into her shell. She sits straight, she speaks in determination, and the lightsaber remains clasped in her hands like a talisman. Finn can still hear its hum in his ears. He’s known that sound before.

He also knows, somehow, someway, that she’s going to leave him.

“I wish you’d wake up,” Rey whispers, riveted on his—body’s—face. “You can’t just drag me across the universe and take a nap, Finn.”

“Right, this is really restful,” he says. “ _Not_.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone with these people. Even if they are the Resistance.”

Finn edges closer to her. He sits on the edge of his bed, ignoring what inhabits it, and hopes that some part of her can hear him. “So, I only had time to meet a couple of them,” he tells her. “But it’s probably okay. They’re the _Resistance_. And you know. Poe Dameron. _General Organa_. I think I’m okay. Are you okay?”

She closes her eyes. “I’m okay,” she says, softly.

Finn loves her. He loves the slope of her nose, the fawn-quiet in her eyes. She makes him feel like a nice thing, too, as if he is integral to her workings in the same way that she manufactures his own. He does not know when that happened; maybe they were always twinned like this, saplings from the same roots ripped out of the ground and buried apart in unfavorable soil. “You have a thing you gotta do,” he says. “So go do it.”

Rey’s joy is a lightsaber—that’s where he had recognized the sound. It works up through his arms and into his jaw and fills the room. “There you are,” she says, and touches his knee as if it’s somewhere safe to land.

 

****xi.** **

“She will be well-taught,” says the old man with the reddening hair. They’re back together again, caught under a dry current of air.

“Skywalker’s that good, huh?”

“Skywalker had a good teacher, as well.” The old man studies Finn as if he’s a puzzle, and it’s probably the first time anyone’s looked at Finn with that expression. “Tell me, Finn, what would you do with a river stone?”

“I don’t know,” says Finn, uncertain. “What is it?”

“If I could give you one such thing,” the old man says, “that one thing trembling in your heart, barely born. If I could take the love others bear for you and squeeze it into a stone, and that stone was the promise of a life with all you had ever asked for, what would you do with it? If that stone could be blown on any angry gust of wind like a leaf, how closely would you clutch it? If that stone could sink you to trenches in a grave sea, how quickly would you release its comfort?”

Finn can feel the stone without prompting: its gentle curvature, the throbbing in his palm. But he knows this is not his stone. He grieves for its loss and offers it back to the old man, the not-so-old man.

“Oh,” he says, and takes it from Finn.

“I don’t know what I’d do,” says Finn, honestly. “No one’s given me a stone yet.”

The old man watches Finn, closely, from the corners of his eyes. “Stones have been given to children like you before.”

Finn is lost in the tides. He looks up at the stars for lack of knowing what direction he ought to take. “We aren’t numbers,” he says, finally. “We have different faces behind our helmets. We learned the same lessons and drills, but we weren’t the same. We didn’t make the same choices. I didn’t even know I had one until I needed to make it.”

The old man looks up, as well. He’s half-lit by three moons that Finn doesn’t recognize, but he’s long given up on guessing where he’s come or where he’s going. But—he realizes, belatedly—the old man must know this desert landscape, this vast wasteland heart-rendering in its loneliness. Something in the way he holds himself—something in the relaxed set of his shoulders, as if he’s seen this horizon so many times that he’s committed its variances to memory.

“I am content in the Force,” the old man says. “I have been reunited with those I love, and those I have lost. But I could teach you, Finn, if you wanted that. I would teach you all that I know so that you can teach others. If we are to survive what's coming, we will need teachers with kindness in them.”

Finn stares at him. “Me?”

"You have remained quiet the length of your life," the old man says. "I hardly knew you breathed until you took off your helmet and failed to.” He touches Finn’s temple, thumb stroking the furrows in it, and smiles. “But there's no mistaking you now.”

Across the sand dunes, fires break into the sky in bright and beautiful flowers. Shadowed figures play across the cliff sides, crying wild into the open air, arms shaking with fury and triumph. “My name is Obi-Wan,” says the old man.

“Am I a Jedi? I thought Rey was the only Jedi left. Besides Skywalker, I mean.”

Obi-Wan gives him something, and Finn automatically takes it. He looks down. It’s Poe’s jacket, well-worn and supple between his fingers. He suddenly knows that he’s holding the jacket in that other place. Someone has returned it to him and is half-asleep at his shoulder. Waiting. Waiting.

Obi-Wan says, “I think you’re someone I’d like to teach.”

 

****xii.****

 

Finn wakes.

(He’s not alone. He gets dark eyes and recognizes dark hair and the soaring of the Force within him can only mean a pilot.)


End file.
